Strategic Public Relations

Pepsi’s SXSW Mash-Up Creates Content from Twitter Cacophony

Social media continues to morph the definition of content -- the latest example of this evolution comes from Pepsi. Pepsi Zeitgeist, a Twitter Mash-Up, tracks activity at the SXSW festival to serve up content that is equal parts fun, pretty and impressive.

Fun: If you’re reading this blog, odds are good you’ve seen more than a few tweets in your Twitter stream sporting a #sxsw tag. Pepsi categorizes all of these tweets into one of six buckets (arriving, drinking, registering, eating, connecting or partying). The tweets are aggregated into a simple visual so you can keep your finger on the pulse of the event.

It’s a smart way to aggregate the metric ton of #sxsw tweets being dispatched from the army of mobile phones and laptops in Austin, TX for the next few days. It also gives the event’s non-attendees a fun way to easily connect with it (and Pepsi).

Pretty: The interface is dead simple. The content is served up as easy-to-digest visuals and the end result is powerful in its simplicity. If I tried to wade through 500 tweets and create something like this for a tracking report it would not be as easy on the eyes.

Impressive: This is only one facet of Pepsi’s efforts at SXSW this year, including their own Twitter ID, blog posts and their Podcast Playground. But for someone not at the show, the Pepsi Zeitgeist site is their crown jewel. The site is a simple way to make a big impact.

Perhaps the most impressive part of the site is the Swarm page. The Swarm page measures the sentiment of food-related tweets and maps them to eateries around the Austin area. So someone tuning into the site can get a great WOM recommendation to see if it’s worth their time to stand in line at that barbecue joint they’re anxious to check out.

The Zeitgeist site is a smart use of Twitter data and a great example of how even thousands of tweets can become visual content.

Zeitgeist also provides a memorable brand experience for consumers by providing value without requiring anything in exchange.

screen grabs uploaded by prblog
tags | public relations | PR | social media | marketing | Pepsi | SXSW | brand

Being Digital at P&G, Raising $100K for Disaster Relief

To inspire some of its key employees with the power of social media, P&G held a social media experiment tonight.

Folks with social media experience of one kind or another from around the country converged on P&G to team up with employees and help raise funds for disaster relief through Tide’s Loads of Hope project.

And we did just that…$20 at a time. $50,000 was raised in four hours employing everything from Digg, blogs and Twitter to MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and a host of niche community sites. Tide matched the $50K for the $100K total.

What did I learn?

It’s not about age, it’s about attitude.
This event reinforced what I’ve been seeing anecdotally at every event I attend. Many assume that high school kids fall out of bed knowing how to create profiles on these sites and become power users and that, er, more mature folks don’t know a tinyurl link from a sausage link. This is just not always the case. While digital natives might figure out online more easily than others, you cannot assume your audience’s technical ability based on age alone. It boils down to attitude.

Fast-Moving Collaboration
The teams that broke their groups down into smaller groups around specific strategies were able to test more ideas more easily and quickly, focus on the ones that did work and drop the ones that did not gain traction.

The competitive nature of the event was intense as the final minutes approached. It felt a bit like being on The Apprentice--less the washed up celebrities of course.

There was an amazing dashboard in every room that listed sales, site visits and conversion rate for each team with a Tide Twitter Feed running beneath this information. As my team fell behind, I wanted to invoke the spirit of Glen Garry Glenross and note that "coffee is for closers." But I needed to focus. By the way, if you still want to get a vintage t-shirt orders will be taken until 11am EDT on Thursday, March 12.

A Benefits Extend Beyond Event
The real benefits from this exercise for the P&G participants are yet to come. Social media is an investment that increases in relevance over time. While a newspaper ad loses its value a day after printing, social media content increases in value over time. And this fact alone is an exciting opportunity for brands, individuals and great causes like Loads of Hope.

tags | Tide | P&G | Loads of Hope | social media | advertising | marketing | brand

Make a Difference. Buy a T-Shirt

I'm here at P&G's digital hack night tonight and we're raising money for disaster relief by selling vintage t-shirts at http://www.tide2.com It is a four-hour (friendly) competition and we're trying to raise $100K for charity.

More on Loads of Hope is below:

And here is a pic of the t-shirt.

I'm competing against the likes of David Armano, Sam Decker, Jason Falls and Pete Blackshaw so Dave Knox and I can use all the help we can get.